Flutterwave Secures $10 Million In Series A Funding

Nigeria’s Flutterwave, which provides modern payments infrastructure for banks and businesses to make and accept payments across Africa, announced that it has raised over $10 million in a Series A round of funding.

The round was led by Greycroft Partners and Green Visor Capital with participation from Y Combinator and Glynn Capital. This new funding is in addition to previous investments by the company’s current investors which include, Omidyar Network, Social Capital, CRE Venture Capital and HOF Capital amongst others.

Flutterwave will use the capital to hire more talent, build out its global operations and fuel its expansion across Africa.

Although spending by Africa’s consumers and businesses totals over $4 trillion annually and African businesses are expected to spend around $3.5 trillion by 2025, African consumers are severely limited in how they can participate in the digital economy. Credit Card penetration by global card brands like Mastercard and Visa in Africa is less than 3% and accepting local payment methods can be complex for large companies like Facebook, Uber, Google, Netflix and Amazon. Flutterwave works with Pan-African Banks to provide these companies with the underlying technology and integrations to payments in local currency with local debit cards, bank accounts or mobile wallets across 30 African countries.

“The digital economy is the new global economy. Yet despite its incredible promise, Africa is excluded from it because of several challenges with its outdated and fragmented payment systems. Flutterwave is building modern payments infrastructure to power growth for the digital economy of one of the fastest-growing regions in the world,” says Iyin Aboyeji, CEO and Co-founder of Flutterwave.

Founded by a team of African ex-bankers, engineers and entrepreneurs, Flutterwave has already processed over $1.2 billion in payments across over 10 million transactions. While it is headquartered in San Francisco, Flutterwave has offices in Lagos, Nairobi, Accra, Johannesburg and plans to expand further across the African continent in 2017.

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“Greycroft is scouring the world for exciting SAAS companies, and FlutterWave is one of the fastest growing software companies we have seen,” says Ian Sigalow at Greycroft Partners. “Flutterwave built a lightweight, developer-friendly tool that provides key elements of a modern banking core, and they have quickly displaced legacy solutions across Africa. In Nigeria alone, they are already processing a few percent of GDP from a cold start at the beginning of last year.”

“Flutterwave is building infrastructure and technology solutions that will help modernize African payments. We are excited to be working with this extraordinary team,” says Joe Saunders, Chairman and General Partner at Green Visor Capital, who also joins Flutterwave’s board of directors.”

“We are excited to work with world-class investors who have helped build global payments giants like Visa and Braintree to achieve our mission of building modern payments infrastructure to connect Africa to the global economy.” adds Aboyeji.